Terra Incognita (27 page)

The morning after the departure of the drillers I went straight to the galley to thaw out, noting that I had forgotten to stand the shovel upright with the result that it was now lost in accumulated snow. Camp had shrunk from forty-five to twenty-two overnight. Patsy Cline was blaring out of the speakers and Bob and Mary were playing frisbee with a piece of French toast.

In the end, the igloo defeated me. As I walked back to it the next night I eyed the drums nestling in cradles outside the Jamesways, pumping diesel into the Preways. Sneaking guiltily into one of the two berthing Jamesways, I lay on the floor behind a curtain. It was so easy.

∗

Ice streams A, B, C, D and E were located on the West Antarctic ice sheet. There was also a little F, but no one ever talked about that. Hermann, the moon-faced
Road to Oxiana
scientist, was investigating Ice Stream B. He wanted me to go out there with him and his team – they were staying for a week – but I knew I wouldn't be able to get back easily, and I couldn't risk being stranded anywhere at that point in the season. I was sad.

‘Just come for the put-in,' he said. I looked at him. It was an extraordinarily kind gesture: the put-in involved two Otter flights, and taking me along would seriously complicate logistics. ‘You must see it,' he said. ‘
I must support you as a writer
.'

Hermann was buzzing around his pallets like a wasp as the Otter arrived. When we took off, I sat in the back of the hold with him. The Whitmore Mountains appeared in the distance. Hermann's eyes lit up.

‘Look!' he said, pointing to a hollow above a deeply crevassed area. ‘The beginning of Ice Stream B!' The ice there looked like a holey old sheet. Hermann pressed a hand-held Global Positioning System unit against the pebble window and said solemnly, ‘We are entering the chromosome zone.' It sounded like the opening sequence of a science-fiction movie. ‘The crevasses change direction as the glacier moves,' he said, ‘and they turn into thousands of Y chromosomes.'

After that we entered the transition zone between the moving ice and the stable ice. It was called the Dragon, a highly deformed, heavily crevassed area streaked with slots. Hermann tapped his propelling pencil against the thick glass of the porthole and held forth. ‘The ice streams are not well understood. The boreholes we have drilled to the bottom of this stream reveal that the base of the stream is at melting point. So they move' – tap, tap, tap – ‘these motions provide a process for rapid dispersal and disintegration of this vast quantity of ice. I mean that most of the drainage of this unstable western ice sheet occurs through the ice streams. The mechanics' – tapping – ‘of ice streaming play a role in the response of the ice sheet to climactic change. In other words the ice streams are telling us about the interactive role of the ice sheet in global change.'

So it seemed that if the ice melted, resulting in the fabled Great Flood of the popular press, water would pour out of the continent, via the ice streams, on to the Siple Coast, virtually the only part of Antarctica not bounded by mountains.

Hermann settled back in his seat. ‘The aim of investigating ice-stream dynamics', he concluded, ‘is to establish whether the ice sheet is stable.'

‘Geology', Lars had told me, ‘is an art as well as a science.'

Hermann stowed the pencil in his top pocket, my ears popped and we landed at a few dozen ragged flags on a relatively stable island in the middle of Ice Stream B. This island, shaped like a teardrop, was called the Unicorn, and Hermann's eye glittered like the mariner's at three or four flags flapping on bamboo poles in the distance. ‘The flags mark our boreholes,' he said, ‘and we have left equipment down in these holes, gathering data. Those two boreholes' – he pointed to a pair of ragged red flags – ‘are called Lost Love and Mount Chaos.' It was like entering a private kingdom. The Dragon, which resembled a slender windblown channel of ice you could walk over in five minutes, was really a two-mile-wide band of chaotic crevassing running for forty miles down one side of the Unicorn. It was a dramatic landscape, its appeal sharpened by the fact that fewer than twenty people had ever seen it.

Hermann's longstanding field assistant, who had travelled with us, was a gazelle-like woman called Keri. When the plane took off and the sound of the engines faded she began spooling out the antenna.

‘You be my deputy field assistant,' Hermann said to me. We crunched off to a flag where he dug around until he found a plywood board encrusted with crystals. Fishing out a skein of wires from underneath it, and attaching them to a small measuring device, he began sucking up data. After a few minutes he beamed, an expression he retained until I left the camp, and possibly much longer. He started inscribing a neat column of figures in pencil in a yellow waterproof notebook.

‘These bits of data', he said, ‘are all little clues to the big puzzle.'

∗

Back at CWA they were detonating the last blasts of the season. Everyone went outside one morning to watch 750 pounds of explosives go up half a mile away. The blaster was close to the site. A black and grey mushroom cloud surged 500 feet into the air, followed, seconds later, by a prolonged muffled boom.

‘One less for lunch, Bob,' said José.

I skied out to see the crater. It was forty-five feet in diameter with a conical mound in the middle, and a delicate film of black soot had settled over the ice. The blaster was admiring his work. ‘My hundredth of the season,' he said proudly.

He was taciturn, as cold as the ice in which he buried his explosives, but once I showed an interest in his bombs his face mobilised and he began opening boxes to show me different kinds of powder and expounding on the apparently limitless virtues of nitroglycerine.

‘Largest charge I've used this season,' he intoned with the treacly vowels of Mississippi, ‘was 9,000 pounds,' and I tut-tutted admiringly as he ran his fingers through baby-pink balls of explosive which looked like candy and smelt of diesel.

It was here, above all other places, that Antarctica resembled the grainy images of the moon's surface. After man had reached both Poles (or it was believed he had), Everest was called the Third Pole, and when it too was conquered in 1953, interest shifted to the moon. Space became an arena for the international race, just as Antarctica was before it: when Yuri Gagarin went up in 1961, three weeks before a U.S. manned rocket, the Americans attempted to turn their failure into success by claiming that their astronauts actually ‘drove' the spaceships whereas Gagarin just sat there. Dogs, oxygen, actual control of the craft . . .
plus ça change
. But NASA failed to provide the world with heroes who could keep hold of the public imagination, and only two years after the hysteria attendant upon the first moonwalk, the U.S. public displayed such overwhelming lack of interest in Apollo Thirteen that the networks dropped the live-from-space broadcast filmed by Jim Lovell and his two colleagues. Houston got prime-time only when the mission was aborted and the astronauts were in danger of dying in outer space.

As the days were slipping away from me, I decided I ought to catch a lift back to McMurdo in the Otter, rather than wait for a Here which might not come. I whipped up a bread-and-butter pudding as a farewell gift. While they were eating it, Jen, a feisty individual working her second season as a field assistant, filled a tin bowl with hot water, rolled up her long-johns and perched on a chair in the galley shaving her legs.

‘But who's gonna see those legs, Jen?' someone yelled. This was followed by a ripple of laughter.

‘Get outta here,' she called. ‘I wanna be a girlie for once.'

I went over to the igloo and lay down one last time, looking up at the spiral of bricks and the blue haze.

Everyone came over to the Otter to say goodbye. ‘See you in Mactown,' said Seismic Man, squinting into the sunlight.

I watched them get smaller and smaller until they disappeared into the ice. However much the mountains and glaciers furnished the most conventionally beautiful Antarctic landscapes, the flat, white wasteland had a power all of its own. One of the Beards whom I interviewed before I left England had said something similar, and conveyed a sense of spirituality in a particularly idiosyncratic way. Robert Swan walked to the South Pole in 1985. He was obsessed with Scott, and his romantic vision sustained him on the long one-way trek. ‘We walked', he told me, ‘knowing that they [Scott and the polar party] were under us, not looking a day older than when they died.' He had a vision of Antarctica. ‘To me it is a symbol of hope,' he said, ‘because – thank God – nobody owns it.' He had spent a good deal of time in Scott's hut. ‘The horror of the last winter, when every time the door rattled the ones who were left behind thought it was them coming back – that atmosphere was still alive, and I thought our expedition could put it all to rest.' As we talked in his cavernous Chelsea offices, and he alternately bit the stumps of his nails and drew deeply on a cigarette, I was disarmed by his identification with Scott. (In fact Swan was much more like Shackleton.) When I mentioned the infamous biography, he snarled. ‘Has Roland Huntford ever walked to the bloody South Pole?' Turning the concept of heroic failure upon himself (as he did most things, though I didn't dislike him for it), he said flatly, ‘I am less known because I get there. Sir Ranulph Fiennes is better known because he keeps on almost getting there, with lots of dramas.'

More than anyone else I talked to, Swan appreciated the staggering effort Scott must have made to write the lapidary last diary entries. ‘In those circumstances, which I know,' he said, ‘when you can barely pick up a pencil, I would have just written, Oh, fuck it.'

∗

The pilot wanted to play cards with the air mechanic, so I moved into the cockpit. A stack of cassettes were jammed between the front seats – most of it was 1970s stuff I hadn't heard since school, and it was perfect cruising music.
Crime of the Century, The Best of the Eagles
, early Bowie, that Fleetwood Mac album we all had. A good deal of joking took place over the headsets as the crew and I were about to set off for Rothera, the British station on the Antarctic Peninsula. The Otter's route, straight across the continent, was about 2,000 miles, whereas mine was ten times that as I had to leave the ice and find my way to a military airstrip in the south of England before starting all over again. I was obliged to take this absurd and deeply frustrating course of action as there is simply no way of travelling from one side of the Antarctic continent to another – short of manhauling, that is. I couldn't hitch a lift on the Otter, as it didn't have an inch of space available. Furthermore, it was too expensive, time-consuming and complicated to attempt to fly from Christchurch to the Falklands on commercial airlines. In the end I had no choice but to buy the cheapest return ticket between Heathrow and Christchurch, and rely on the Royal Air Force to get me down to the Falklands in time to meet a Dash-7 plane from the British Antarctic Survey.

Looking down at the earth from 12,000 feet, I felt then that my life was in perfect perspective. It was a sense of oneness with the universe – I belonged to it, just like the crystals forming on the wing tip. At that moment I knew that all my anxieties and failures and pain were shadows on the wasteland. Admiral Byrd, an unbeliever, experienced something similar in Antarctica, in his own way. He described it as ‘a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man's despair and found it groundless'. It seemed to represent the ultimate destination of all our journeys.

CHAPTER TEN

Men are not old here

Only the rocks are old, and the sheathing ice:

Only the restless sea, chafing the frozen land,

Ever moving, matched by the ceaselessly-circling sun . . .

Lighten our darkness, oh Lord;

And lettest thou thy servants depart in peace,

For peace is here, here in the quiet land.

Frank Debenham, geologist on Scott's last expedition

A
N ALASKAN MOUNTAINEER
returned from the field with scabbed cheeks and duct tape stuck round the metal frame of his glasses. He was very gloomy, for he had lost his snowmobile. I said I thought losing a snowmobile was quite a feat.

‘Well,' he said glumly, ‘you have to tie the throttle down, otherwise over long distances your hands freeze. So if you hit a sastrugi and fall off without your safety cord connected to kill the motor, the thing just keeps going until it runs out of fuel – could be a hundred miles.'

I wondered what the occupants of another remote field camp would make of an unaccompanied snowmobile careering across the ice sheet.

My office was permanently adrift with heaps of polypropylene underwear, a tangle of crampons, rolls of film, ziplocks of trailmix, tents, tent pegs, insulated mugs, waterbottles, pee bottles and neoprene bottles of Jack Daniels. One day, I was kneeling on the floor repacking my survival bag when the grey silence of the lab was shattered by an explosion of voices next door. Imre Friedmann and his team had arrived. Hungarian by birth, Imre was a distinguished microbiologist and, at 73, an old Antarctic warrior. He had a valley named after him. Shortly before coming south he had performed 500 squats in the office of some senior bureaucrat to prove that he was fit enough to join an expedition heading for the Siberian permafrost later in the year. Besides studying the cryptoendolithic microbial communities of the Dry Valleys, he was a fertile source of Biolab lore.

‘It was very cramped,' he said one day, ‘
but we all had space
. It was before the days of Walkman, and my graduate students used to listen to loud rock music. I retaliated on the other side of the partition by playing classical music, and the volume wars would break out. When I was really desperate I turned to Schoenberg.'